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Margaret Sanger (1879–1966). Woman and the New Race. 1920.
V. The Wickedness of Creating Large Families
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If its effects upon the mother and the wage earning father were not enough to condemn the large family as an institution, its effects upon the child would make the case against it conclusive. In the United States, some 300,000 children under one year of age die each twelve months. Approximately ninety per cent of these deaths are directly or indirectly due to malnutrition, to other diseased conditions resulting from poverty, or to excessive childbearing by the mother. 7
The direct relationship between the size of the wage-earner’s family and the death of children less than one year old has been revealed by a number of studies of the infant death rate. One of the clearest of these was that made by Arthur Geissler among miners and cited by Dr. Alfred Ploetz before the First International Eugenic Congress. 1 Taking 26,000 births from unselected marriages, and omitting families having one and two children, Geissler got this result:
Deaths During
First Year
1st born children 23%
2nd " " 20%
3rd " " 21%
4th " " 23%
5th " " 26%
6th " " 29%
7th " " 31%
8th " " 33%
9th " " 36%
10th " " 41%
11th " " 51%
12th " " 60%
Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live twelve months. 8
This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a year die before they reach the age of five. 9
Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members. Moreover, the overcrowded homes of large families reared in poverty further contribute to this condition. Lack of medical attention is still another factor, so that the child who must struggle for health in competition with other members of a closely packed family has still great difficulties to meet after its poor constitution and malnutrition have been accounted for. 10 <Snip>
Note 1. Problems in Eugenics, London, 1913. [back]
Note 2. Interesting and perhaps surprising light is thrown upon the origin of the term “race suicide” by the following quotation from an article by Harold Bolce in the Cosmopolitan (New York) for May 1909:
“‘The sole effect of prolificacy is to fill the cemeteries with tiny graves, sacrifices of the innocents to the Moloch of immoderate maternity.’ Thus insists Edward A. Ross, Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin; and he protests against the ‘dwarfing of women and the cheapening of men’ as regards the restriction of the birth rate as a ‘movement at bottom salutary, and its evils minor, transient and curable.’ This is virile gospel, and particularly significant coming from the teacher who invented the term ‘race suicide,’ which many have erroneously attributed to Mr. Roosevelt.”
